Government Wakes Up To EMP Threat

After several delays and repeatedly ignored warnings, the federal
government is starting to recognize the threat posed to national
security by an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, event.The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, has begun taking
steps to protect the nation’s power grid from at least the natural
version of an EMP by proposing new regulation standards addressing the
impacts of a geomagnetic disturbance, or GMD. The regulations are coming almost a year after Congress passed the
Secure High-Voltage Infrastructure for Electricity from Lethal Damage,
or SHIELD, Act to “protect the critical infrastructure, electric power
grid, communications and transportation, banking and finance, food and
water.”The Act was passed to attempt to protect the electric power grid from
a GMD generated by a blast of geomagnetic particles from the sun, which
could destroy 300 or more of the 2,100 high-voltage transformers that
are the backbone of the U.S. electric grid and leave over 130 million
people without power.GMDs occur when solar storms on the sun’s surface send out streams of
electrically charged particles toward earth, where they interact with
earth’s magnetic field. This interaction could potentially generate EMP
events that would send geomagnetically induced electric currents, or
GICs, through transmission lines and through power transformers,
wreaking havoc on the nation’s high-voltage power grid.As WND reported, the
administration was scolded in congressional testimony last month for
failing to prepare for the damage an EMP event could cause, with
estimates suggesting the mass and prolonged power loss could making
living in the United States “unsustainable” for 70 to 90 percent of the
population.For even if America is spared an intentional EMP attack, nature has shown in the past she’s more than capable of crippling the power grid on her own.The largest solar storm measured to date was the solar storm of 1859,
also known as the Carrington Event, which was observed and recorded by
Richard C. Carrington.From Aug. 28 until Sept. 2, 1859, numerous sunspots and solar flares
were observed on the sun. This solar storm generated a stream of
electrically charged particles that headed directly for Earth. The
particles were traveling at disturbingly fast speeds. Observed by the
British astronomer Richard Carrington, the particles made it to Earth in
just 17 hours, a journey that normally took three to four days.The resulting geomagnetic storm caused aurorae to be seen around the
world, even over the Caribbean. The light generated from the storm over
the Rocky Mountains was so bright that it woke up gold miners, who began
making breakfast, thinking it was morning.Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some
cases shocking telegraph operators. Telegraph poles started sparking,
and telegraph paper spontaneously caught fire. Some telegraph systems
continued to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected
from their power supplies. Telegraph operators said that the lines were
running on “celestial batteries.”A similar phenomenon is feared to manifest itself next year when the current solar storm cycle reaches its peak.The national power grid is not the only system that is vulnerable to
space-based storms. Any networked system that can conduct electricity
over long distances is vulnerable to electromagnetic disruptions.Examples of these conducting networks are not only electrical power
transmission grids, but also oil and gas pipelines, undersea
communication cables, telephone and telegraph networks and railway
systems.GICs can also cause accelerated corrosion of pipelines as well as
disruptions to geophysical exploration surveys and oil and gas drilling
operations.GICs caused a magnetic storm on March 13, 1989, in Canada. A GIC
caused widespread electric power system problems, the most severe being a
power-system-wide blackout on the Hydro-Quebec power system, with the
damage extending as far south as New Jersey.Large-scale blackouts can have serious economic impacts even if power
is restored in a few hours. A four-hour major blackout in France cost
over 1 billion dollars. In a study of the economic impact of a major
blackout in the U.S., it was estimated that the cost of a blackout in
the Northeast United States could easily exceed several billion dollars.In a 2010 joint study prepared for the FERC, the Departments of
Energy, Homeland Security and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory reported
that GMD events can develop quickly over large geographic areas, having
the capability to produce large outages and significant damage to
electrical distribution equipment.There is a fear among some government agencies that a geomagnetic
storm could cause permanent damage to large transformers and long lead
times until power is restored to the power grid.In a recently released FERC report,
any recovery of electrical systems could plausibly extend into months
in many parts of an impacted region. The report notes that large power
distribution transformers usually cannot be repaired in the field, and
if damaged, would need to be replaced with new units, which have long
lead times.“The physical damage of certain system components (e.g.
extra-high-voltage transformers) on a large scale, as could be effected
by any of these threats, could result in prolonged outages as
procurement cycles for these components range from months to years,” the
report stated.If these systems are damaged, it is anticipated that the affected area would suffer power rationing and rotating blackouts.Further threatening national security, the technology for
manufacturing these transformers is no longer found in the United
States. The technology to manufacture this equipment now resides in
Germany and Japan.Estimates prepared by the National Research Council of the National
Academies concluded that these events have the potential to cause
widespread, long-term losses with economic costs to the United States
estimated at $1-2 trillion and a recovery time of four to ten years.The government recognizes in the report that there could be
substantial costs associated with some measures to protect against
damage to the grid, but the harm to society would be much greater.For example, estimates for installing blocking devices on
transformers range from $100,000 to $500,000 for each affected
transformer, but the estimated total cost of the August 2003 four-day
blackout in the United States was between $4 billion and $10 billion.As a result of these and other studies, FERC determined that there is
a gap in the reliability standards regarding GMDs. To close this gap,
the power grid owners will be required to devise a plan that will
contain “strategies for protecting against the potential impact of GMDs
based on factors such as the age, condition, technical specifications or
location of specific equipment.”Priority has been placed on protecting “priority loads,” providing
service to hospitals, law enforcement, emergency services and other
critical infrastructures.In the short term, special emphasis has been placed on setting up
operation procedures to protect the grid on short notice. At an April
30, 2012, technical conference, Mr. William Murtagh, program coordinator
at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather
Prediction Center, stated that a warning is issued when a geomagnetic
disturbance event reaches the NASA Advanced Composition Explorer
satellite, and at that point, in some cases, it could be 20 or 30
minutes before the event reaches the Earth’s magnetic field.Not everyone, however, favors these coming regulations stemming from the SHIELD Act.According to Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, executive director of the Task
Force on National and Homeland Security, “The electric power industry
doesn’t want it. They have a huge and powerful lobby. Even though there
are a lot of people in the electric power industry who understand the
threat and want to do something about this, unfortunately, the smart
engineers who work for the electric power industry are not in Washington
as lobbyists. … The electric power industry operates in the 19th
century regulatory environment.”